New Wave in Bollywood – More Experimenting Less Formulae

Bollywood film undergoes a change as the new breed of filmmakers are now experimenting with new genres of short duration film-making, rather than sticking to age old three hours of dream drama. Like many other film industries across the world, Bollywood too has two streams of film making namely – Popular or mainstream commercial cinema and Parallel cinema.

Bollywood filmmakers till now had an unrestrained eye for action, drama, song and flight sequence in their films to heighten dramatic effects. With plenty of time at disposal, watching a film used to be a popular form of entertainment and mostly family outing for the most of the people in earlier days.

A new genre of Film Makers

With opening up of the overseas market, more Bollywood releases abroad and the explosion of multiplexes in big cities, led to wider box office successes. All this led to the filmmakers experimenting with the unusual themes and time durations.

Nagesh Kukunoor, a Bollywood filmmaker known for his offbeat films like ‘Hyderabad Blues’, ‘Rockford’ and ‘Bollywood Calling’ felt that though traditional song and dance love stories will always remain the audience favourite, but their preference was changing. The traditional song and dance love story will always have its place because we as Indian audience love it. But now the trend is decreasing in terms of numbers that follow this rule.

Some of the recent releases that fared well at the box-office like ‘Bheja Fry’ and ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’ were just about two hours long. While some felt that they were cheated of slick song and dance numbers, most of the viewers were appreciative of the shorter duration flicks, which eliminated melodramatic and needlessly long fight or musical sequences.

Another film, ‘Dus Kahaniyan’ that had ten different narratives, twelve writers, eight composers, six directors and 25 actors was for less than two hours and fared reasonably well at the box-office. Noted film critics Indu Mirani says that if our films were of shorter duration more audiences would patronize the movies. When hollywood films are normally between 90 to 120 minutes, bollywood films are 3 hours and more. Short films might attract the audience that patronises other films besides Hindi films to want to go and see it.

Indian Cinema becomes more advanced technically

Indian cinema has become more suave and technically more advanced over time. The films made in 2000s saw growth in Bollywood’s popularity in the world and the global audience prefers shorter and crisper edits. International community is finally sitting up and taking notice of the largest film industry in the world, estimated to be worth about two billion dollars and expected to grow to 43 billion dollars by 2011, according to industry estimates.

New Faces, new Marketing trends

There are a host of newcomers knocking on Bollywood’s doors and many are getting a look-in because everyone in the industry – from directors to producers – is willing to try out something different to bring people to multiplexes.

With actors hiking up prices, it often makes sense to try out a new face for a film, especially the small budget ones. Corporate funding, too, has given a new lease of life to the industry as more production houses are signing on new faces for out-of-the-box films.

Like the movie ‘Aamir’ was directed by debutant director Rajkumar Gupta, who assisted Anurag Kashyap in Black Friday. It tells the story of an ordinary man – played by television’s favourite hero Rajeev Khandelwal – caught in extraordinary circumstances. ‘Aamir’ has fared well at the box-office despite being a low-budget film. Thus assuring producers in the industry that films with relatively unknown faces do work if the content is good.

From debutant actors and directors to unconventional story lines and inventive camera work, Hindi cinema has undergone a revolution over the past few years. Not all newcomers are lucky, of course. While new actors like Imraan Khan, Harman Baweja and Sonal Chauhan of Jannat fame managed to make considerable noise at the box office, celebrity sons Mimoh Chakraverty and Sikander Kher did not make a splash.